Barbara Wood's Dispatches from the Home Front: Cash registers ring but I'm not listening Barbara Wood's Dispatches from the Home Front: Cash registers ring but I'm not listening (December 21, 2005)

This year, I'm enjoying the holiday season far more than I usually do because I've got a secret weapon helping to make my Christmas merry, not harried. I'm not shopping.

I love certain aspects of this time of year -- decorating the house, baking gingerbread and making toffee and peanut brittle, dressing up for parties and seeing friends and family.

But I dread one thing -- the shopping.

I do not like to shop. Malls especially distress me. I hate crowds, perfume counters make me sneeze, and the commercialization makes me cringe. We have never watched television at our home mostly because I just can not stand the advertisements.

I actually don't mind shopping in hardware stores, especially if they have a nursery, but for some reason most of the people I know do not want a gift from the hardware store.

When my older daughter, Caitlin, was about 12 she decided it was incredibly important for her to shop for clothes and other things she couldn't possibly live without and begged for trips to the mall.

I was pretty sure that just listening to the music they play in any store that someone her age would want to shop in would cause me brain damage. My husband came to the rescue by offering to take her, and he has ever since.

He has a routine, I've been told, of buying a coffee and sitting down to read outside the store she (and now my younger daughter) is in. They shop, he reads, and I don't have to go anywhere near the mall. Everyone is happy.

When Caitlin got her driver's license, things got even better. She started shopping for me. She even offered at one time to buy all the family groceries, but it didn't work because she didn't buy what I wanted to cook. She even took over accompanying her younger sister to the mall. Caitlin, unlike me, loves to shop.

But then Caitlin ruined it all by going off to college in San Diego, too far away to help out. I was very disappointed last year when I found out she was going to get home only a few days before Christmas and I'd have to do the shopping myself. I did as much as I could on the Internet and tried to do everything else by going into only two stores. If they didn't have it, no one was going to get it.

But this year Caitlin has come back to my rescue. She offered to do all the shopping. Except for a few things Dan and I have bought for ourselves and given to each other to give back on Christmas (the best way to assure you get what you want, I've found), Caitlin has done it all. When she was home for Thanksgiving she even loaded up on stocking stuffers.

The extent of my involvement is the phone calls she usually makes to me before she makes a purchase. Plus, when her packages arrive I store them in a closet for her to wrap when she gets home.

All this has another hidden advantage. On Christmas Day, when everyone opens their gifts, if they're not happy with them -- it's not really my fault.

I'm looking forward to this Christmas.
Barbara Wood is a freelance writer, photographer and gardener from Woodside. Her column runs the third week of the month.

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